[IC] At Stars End

[Penny]

Dockside on Paradise

“Lieutenant Cykali, report to the bridge at once,” The PA crackled with Captain Keene’s voice. Even through the distortion of the aging ships address system it sounded peevish and irritated. Mave sighed and looked down at the work the corpsman was completing. The bullet wound was still red and puckered against he tan flesh, oddly reminiscent of the way a windshield starred when struck with a round. The pirate had been lucky to wing her when she and her detachment had burst into their lair, but he had been good too, she was glad that one of the crewmen following her had unloaded his shotgun into the fellow. As far as she was concerned there was no place in the universe for enemies who combined skill with good fortune.

“No rest for the wicked hey LT?” the corpsman said with a resigned chuckle. He had the liquid accent of a Tau Cettian though his service file claimed he was from Handle’s World. Many spacers had such inconsistencies in their personnel files. The were an itinerant lot and star travel was dangerous and unpleasant enough that no one asked two many questions when it came to skilled bodies. During the height of the recent war with the Terran Hegemony the fleet had taken to conscripting sailors left and right and anyone with an ident chip and all his limbs had been good enough for the recruiting boards. Most of those sailors had been paid of with the Peace and had found service in the merchant fleets when the warships they had crewed were mothballed or sold out of service. Those that remained were career men and women who had found something about the service that compesnated them in a way the higher wages of merchant service did not. In the case of Doc Pavara, it was that he was good at his job, and he liked being with other people who where good at theirs.

“Thanks doc,” Mave replied and hopped down of the table that folded down from the integral medical computer. Technician III Raj Pavara, allegedly from Handle’s World, wasn’t a doctor in any sense the civilized galaxy would acknowledge but he had nursed more wounded crew members back to health than Mave cared to think about it. A fleet medical technician rating wasn’t the same as being a physician but it was better than most people had out here on the edge of settled space and he probably had more actual medical knowledge than most of the charlatans an amateurs that called themselves doctors here abouts.

“It goes without saying that you should try to stay off that!” Pavara called as Mave strode out of the med bay and into the C-deck corridor.

“Yeah yeah, subject to the needs of the service etcetera,” she called back over her shoulder, doing her best to ignore the jolts of discomfort that radiated through her hip with each step. She was a trim woman in her mid twenties, of average height but with the lean whipcord muscles that years of the brutal work of interstellar travel. Her dark red brown hair was cut short to Fleet standard and her green eyes were bright and alert. The ship was almost deserted, most of the crew were on liberty at the moment, spending their pay in a orgy of drunken debauchery at the taverns and brothels of Dockside, the seedy village that had grown up around the harbor at Paradise. While starships could land anywhere, water was preferred as it soaked up the thrust of landing motors continual lift off and landing would eventually destroy even a concrete surface, and without constant refinishing they soon became pitted to use. Water was also the primary source of reaction mass feeding the ships fusion bottles as well as a safe working fluid for most of the hydraulic systems.

Those crewmen she did encounter were dressed as she was, in the grey mottled battledress of the Fleet, though the garment was military they were for the most part stained with lubricant and chemicals, marking them as members of a working ship rather than some rear echelon parade unit. Most of the glances were friendly, some were sympathetic, though a few were guardedly hostile. Captain Keene had his favorites among the crew, and while they never rose to the level of outright insubordination, they made their opinion of her known. A starship was a small community, and officers couldn’t afford to maintain distance from their spacers, the situation made it hard to maintain discipline under the best of circumstances, and an officer like Keene made the task almost impossible.

Suppressing a sigh, Mave climbed the aft companionway heading up to A deck and the bridge. The winding stairway jolted at her wound but she gritted her teeth and kept climbing. On commercial ships elevators were sometimes used, but on hard charging warships, the risk of a elevator tube torquing and trapping people inside were unacceptably high. By the time she reached the top her side was throbbing with pain, though somehow she doubted Captain Keene was in a mood to give her more time off in the infirmary. Time to face the music.

[Silent Showers]

Approximately 2.5km Outside Paradise Space Dock

"Lets go ya lazy fockin spunk bubbles, we're twenty minutes in and we haven't even reached the six kilometer mark!" Bellowed Gunnery Sergeant Antonio Freedmont, a hulking bear of a man assigned as the senior enlisted Non-Commissioned Officer to the Madame's detachment of Marines, clearly not pleased by the progress of his platoon on their eight kilometer shoreside run. His annoyance only magnified as he watched each young naval infantryman pass by, huffing and wheezing while their lungs struggled to supply the body with the sparse oxygen provided by the thin air on the recently terraformed planet. Gritting his teeth, the NCO fell in step beside one particular man, an officer of the ship. "You're lagging behind, Sir," the derision in the Marine's use of "Sir" was thinly veiled, the much larger man making his dislike for the young naval officer known. "You'll set a bad example for the men." Without ever making eye contact with the Lieutenant, the Marine NCO sped off, hollering at his platoon as he went.

Huffing and puffing as he slogged along the foothill paths surrounding the Docks, Lieutenant Junior Grade Jasper Gnash wheezed in misery before picking up his feet and pushing on towards the front of the column of Marines. He hated it, hated that he had been the officer assigned to babysit the meatheads while they were on the ship. The Corps didn't have officers of their own, they were given naval officers to lead them when underway while maintaining themselves as a security force for naval facilities when ashore. All because a few fanatical loyalist Marine officers had orchestrated an armed coup against the provisional government after it seceded from the Terran Hegemony. Their little stunt had almost ended the Commonwealth's bid for independence before it had even begun. Here he was, swimming in sweat and misery on some backwater barely worth mapping on a star chart, all because the stupid jarheads couldn't be trusted.

"Anyone who doesn't make it back before thirty five minutes is up is secured to ship without liberty!" Everyone groaned, Jasper included, even though he knew intellectually the man couldn't make him do anything he didn't choose to. However, the burden of command demanded he lead by example so if he failed to meet the Gunny's inane requirements he would have to endure the already laid out consequences. Damn dirty rat bastard knew he wasn't build for grunt work the way the rest of them were, he was being singled out in a way he couldn't reasonably complain about. Dammit all...

The last two kilometers were absolute hell on Jasper's lungs, back, and legs, the burning in all three making the young officer wish he would die of heat stroke already so that he didn't have to consciously suffer the waking torture of intense physical exertion. With the end in sight, Jasper could almost cry in relief, if the sweltering heat hadn't already sucked all the moisture from his body. He didn't finish in time.

---

It hurt to breath, it hurt to move. As the Officer in Charge of the Marine boarding detachment, he was required to train with them and had his quarters on their section of the ship, a long way off from the rest of his fellow junior officers. It was a lonely existence for the Lieutenant, not one of the Marines, no longer a standard member of the crew, and isolated by billet from both. Aside from the motivated gung-ho warrior types, Boarding Action Duty, while garnering extra pay, was the most despised and dreaded duty a Junior Officer aboard a ship could be assigned. As a line officer, a man destined for command posts, he didn't have the luxury of a specialized trade role like the Staff Corps officers of a ship. Because of this, he was of course a prime candidate for the worst duty aboard a vessel. "It builds character," they said, "You'll be a better officer for it" he was told. Horseshit, all of it. They weren't at war anymore, they rarely boarded an enemy ship and when they did, it was to capture the remaining crew of a disabled pirate vessel. A task like that hardly required an officer of the line to accomplish. He could be in a fighter squadron, or even a Naval Special Operations group, but no, he was here, with a bunch of muscle bound trigger pulling meatheads.

"Lieutenant Gnash, report to the bridge at once." Jasper felt his heart suddenly jump into his throat before it settle back down into the pit of his stomach. "Shit..." It had to be about the last boarding they had conducted. He had been given another junior officer to lead a separate strike group during the boarding and if he had heard right, she'd gotten herself shot during the ordeal. The man had no doubts he was finally about to get his ass chewing for the debacle, despite it not being entirely his fault. Shit ran down hill on a ship, and unfortunately for Jasper, he was on the bottom of that hill where it all just piled up.

Heaving a sigh of resignation, he straightened out his uniform and began the long journey from the aft section of the ship up toward the command deck. He was tall and thin, cut from all of the damn running and physical training he had to do with his platoon, short black hair cut in a high fade sat atop his lean face which framed dark hazel eyes. Unlike many of his fellows, he was in his late twenties, having gone to the Naval Academy after a foray on commercial vessels for a number of years. He was a spacer through and through. After the long climb and plenty of time to stew over why he might have been summoned to the command deck, Jasper came to the closed blast doors of the bridge. Stopping, he gave a sidelong glance to the woman who had already been waiting by the time he had arrived. Shi-t, this really was about the boarding, it had to be. The woman standing next to him was that other junior officer from the boarding.

He was absolutely fucked.

[Penny]

“Ah Mr Gnash, so good of you to join us at last,” Captain Keene drawled mockingly. He was a spare man, six feet and with slightly pudgy features that belied his preference for heavy diet and the lessening of physical activity that came with his rank. His retreating scalp and bulbous nose gave him a vaugle canine look that matched his personality perfectly. Keene was an older man in his late forties who had spent the entire war out here in the outer territories while other officers gained promotion and acclaim in the central theatres. He resented fate, he resented the navy and most of all he resented his two Lieutenants, both of whom had seen action enough during the war to earn themselves postings in the much downsized peacetime fleet. Though his remak suggested they had been waiting for some time, Mave had only preceded Gnash by a few seconds.

The bridge of the Maddie, as the crew nicknamed the ship, was ten meters wide and roughly circular. A raised dais with ring of consoles surrounded it save for the foremost section which housed a high definition holographic display. A star ship had no need to see the space infront of it, as manoeuvring room was theoretically unlimited and the sensors provided better data orders of magnitude greater than what the naked eye could hope to gather and naval architects saw no need to expose a ships COC behind so flimsy a shield as glass or transparent steel. The holographic viewport was remoting the feed of one of the sensors and displaying a pixel perfect replica of the view from the dorsal A sensor battery that was located directly above the bridge. It showed the harbor of Paradise and a section of the town beyond, twinkling with lights that rippled off the sea between the quay and the docked starship.

A trio of officers were at their stations, though all save the XO, a sour faced man named Halberstadt, at least pretended to be preoccupied with their duties. They were in a safe port with a developed harbor and a rudimentary orbital watch, so those duties likely consisted of catching up on paperwork or personal reading, mostly they were just there because the regs required the ship have at least a minimal anchor watch. Halberstat was an unpleasant man, though his hatred was more general and thus somehow more bearable than Keene’s.

“Well I see we have a spacer pretending to be a marine and a marine pretending to be a spacer,” Keene drawled, evidently very pleased with the jibe. Mave bristled at the barb but kept her face professionally impassive. She had started out her military service with a vacuum commando unit, an elite force intended to board ships in orbit, or to undertake other sensitive zero-g operations. Vac commandos had alot of the same technical skills as spacers, though they tended towards the technical side for sabotage and capture of enemy vessels. Mave had been good at the job, good enough that she had been given a slot in an advanced OCS designed to fill the leadership vacuum in a rapidly expanding war time fleet. Mave had jumped at the chance, hoping to return to the Vac Commandos as an officer, but her scores at OCS had shifted her into a signal intelligence program that pushed her onto a career track in the regular fleet. Despite a number of conscious and unconscious attempts to get busted back the VC, here she remained. Keene certainly knew that and was using it to twist the knife of his own petty grudge.

“Sir,” Mave and Gnash spoke at once in an the identical fleet response, the refrain of the put upon junior officer dealing with the abuse of their superiors. Keene looked slightly disappointed at the lack of reaction.

“You are my operations officer are you not Ms Cyckali?” he asked, abruptly beginning to pace back and forth in front of the two Lieutenants.

“Yes Sir,” Mave responded, keepng her eyes locked on the hatch combing of the starboard entry port rather than following the stalking Captains progress.

“Ah, I see, and as my operations officer is it not your duty to inform me of any operational developments?” Keene sneered triumphantly.

“Uhh.. Yes Sir..” A sinking feeling was very rapidly balling up in her stomach. Keene produced a hard copy sheet and waved it around like a victorious battle flag.

“Then how does it come to be that I learn that an AU citizen has been taken prisoner on Lout Shai, from the officer manning the comms station!” Though he had started the sentence in a reasonable tone, he was screeching by the end of it. Mave very deliberately told herself that whatever she did, she should not say she was in the infirmary.

“I was in the infirmary sir,” her traitours mouth declared without missing a beat

[Silent Showers]

So, it was going to be an inquisition, was it? Jasper had seen that kind of behavior from commanding officers before and it always turned ugly. Particularly for the accused. Good Captain Keene was out for blood, that much was clear. The fact that he and Mave individually had more personal awards, most of which were for combat action and a few for valor, than the Captain and XO combine, seemed to be the root cause for his vitriol. Despite the ribbing at their current circumstances, Jasper couldn't help but feel a certain sense of irony at their insufferable superior's unprofessional and downright childish insult. While he didn't like being the OIC of the Marine detachment, he had seen more than his fair share of boarding operations as the pilot of a dropship, braving enemy point defense fire to offload marines into the breach created by the Vac-Comm teams. More than once his ship had been disabled during entry, forcing him to move forward as one of the boarding team members, thus earning him a niche set of skills and experiences most spacers didn't have, barring specialized troops like VCs and other marine units. To say he was pretending to be a marine was true, but only half so and if he had taken one thing from his time with the jarheads, it's that you always protect your own.

"Sir, Lieutenant Cykali up to her release from the infirmary has been on temporary assignment to the MBT and thus her primary function and responsibility was to myself as the OIC. By your direction, Lieutenant Cykali was relived of her duties as Operations Officer up until which time she had completed her duties as 2IC under my charge in observance of Fleet Naval order twenty one Oscar section-" There it was, the XO springing into action like a jungle cat pouncing upon it's prey from the trees.

"Who in God's name gave you permission to speak, Lieutenant?!" Raged the perpetually scowling man, stepping up to all but spit in Jasper's face as he began the dressing down.

At this point, the few souls that remained on the bridge had all but stopped what they were doing, watching the shit show unfold before them. Technically speaking, reprimand like this was to be handled outside the view of their peers but Captain Keene enjoyed putting on a humiliating display where the junior officers of his ship were concerned. The XO was unfortunately no different.

"Lieutenant Gnash, do you know why we assigned you as the OIC for the marines?" Halberstadt was almost snarling by this point, nose millimeters away from the junior officer's.

"... No, Sir..." Jasper replied uncertainly, knowing full well he didn't like where this was going.

"Of course you don't." the gaunt man spat, his hollow sunken eyes narrowing into hate filled slits.

The bridge had fallen dead silent at this point, naught but the soft chimes and humming of electronic equipment breaking the still as the XO began circling around Jasper at an infuriatingly slow pace, hands locked behind his back. It took all of the younger officer's self control to keep his eyes locked forward, body rigid at attention as they had not been given permission to rest at ease since their arrival.

"You're assigned to the marines because your usefulness begins and ends with your ass in the seat of a dropship, Lieutenant." Jasper had to fight the urge to let out a derisive snort when he heard the half-assed excuse for pinning him with the duty.

So that's what this was about. It was a bit of an open secret among the crew that their fine XO had flunked out of the flight program early on in his career, something about not meeting the physical requirements for duty as a pilot. Ever since then, the frail looking man had always held a personal grudge at those young officers who had been able to do what he couldn't. Jasper felt like he should have seen it coming, but he'd tried giving his superior the benefit of the doubt. Not that it had done him any good.

Unable to formulate an appropriate and respectful response, the pilot pretending to be a marine stood locked at attention, refusing to meet the spiteful man's gaze lest he provoke him any more than his mere existence already had. To his relief, the XO stepped away from his junior and assumed his position left and abreast of his Captain.

"You know what, Captain Keene? It sounds as though Lieutenant Gnash has volunteered to share the burden of responsibility with Lieutenant Cykali. It's only appropriate, him being her OIC at the time, don't you agree?" With his arms crossed over his chest, the Executive Officer of the Madame De Pompadour drilled both of the junior officers with more than a bit of scorn.

Yup, he was absolutely fucked.

[Penny]

“An excellent notion as the operation I have in mind will require a drop ship pilot,” Keene all but crooned. Mave struggled to resist the urge to glance sideways at Gnash. The Maddie had two small armed dropships that served as tenders and couriers. Each could carry a crew of about ten, perhaps fifteen if they were good friends. The vessels were capable of short jumps, though they had nothing like the range of even a small corvette like the Maddie. Mave couldn’t imagine where his mind was going with this but she was fairly confident she wouldn’t be much pleased when she discovered.

“As you are both such excellent, and dedicated officers,” he simpered, “I cannot imagine you will have any difficulty convincing Khan Zang, to release our citizens.” Mave didn’t react at first, not because she didn’t understand the words, but because they were so outlandish they refused to fit together in her mind. Tiypo Zhang was the self appointed Khan of Lout Shai and by all reports a psychopath as well as a savage. Lout Shai had an official treaty of friendship with the Arcadian Union, though that had been signed several revolutions ago. Lout Shai had been a Hegemony Possession at some point, but even before the war the Terrans had grown so tired of being shot at by every clansman on the planet they had simply pulled up stumps and left the place to rot. Unfortunately for the newly liberated Lout Shai, the only thing holding its fractured clans together had been the Terrans, and with the mutual enemy gone, they turned all their guns and unspent savagery on each other. Settling blood feuds was as common as breathing and the only thing as certain as the fact that one blood thirsty tyrant would fall was that the next one would be worse.

“Well Sir,” Mave began carefully.

“I’m sure that with an AU corvette above his city…”

“Ah you misunderstand me Lieutenant,” Keene interrupted, positively glowing with malice.

“The Madame De Pompadour, will not be accompanying you. It is going to take us a further four days to rebuild starboard thrusters 2 and 3 and I feel this matter cannot suffer that delay.”

Mave gaped at her captains words. The Khan might have been cowed into aquiencence with the presence of a warship in orbit, but he was certain to be afronted by a single dropship with a dozen armed sailors aboard. He would have them strangled with their own guts. Belatedly she managed to close her mouth a heartbeat before the Captain could comment on her shock. The AU would take a dim view of its officers being killed, maybe even send troops to topple the regime and install a puppet government. That might even be the idea behind the whole hairbrained scheme, and though Mave supposed she was a patriot, that certainly didn’t extend to dying in order to provide a pretext for the diplomats to justify the occupation of a backwater.

“We could…” Mave began but she closed her mouth. Nothing she suggested now, while the Captain’s blood was up, was likely to garner a useful response. Instead she merely nodded.

“We will gather a crew from the on duty watch at once Sir,” she replied instead. Keene’s grin grew even deeper and his face took on a falsely gentle rebuke.

“Now Lieutenant, the on duty watch hasn’t had a chance at shore leave yet, recall a party who have already had some fun.”

“Yes Sir,” Mave replied, doing her best not to clench her teeth. Rousting drunken spacers out of brothels and bars and chivying them into a crew would neither be quick, nor pleasant and her name would be mud with spacers for yanking them away from their good time.

“I’ll expect you to be lifting within the next four hours Lieutenants,” Keene said with a final self satisfied smirk.

“You are dismissed.”

Mave followed Gnash out into the hall way and down the companion way till they were well out of ear shot of the bridge, then she slumped against the bulkhead. Pain stabbed up her side from the bullet wound.

“We are so fucked.”